


your compass is broken (but you'd follow me anywhere)

by elysiantree



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Enemies to Lovers, Enemy AU, F/M, Kinda, adrienette enemy au, but then a sad ending, i almost wrote "endiang" lol, i wrote this in a day, it's up for interpretation, so yeah angst with a sad ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 12:07:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28581732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elysiantree/pseuds/elysiantree
Summary: They're different in every way imaginable, and they both understand that clear as day.Bunnix watches from her burrow.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Others mentioned
Comments: 26
Kudos: 50





	your compass is broken (but you'd follow me anywhere)

**Author's Note:**

> vaguely inspired by snacc_noir 's au, hit them up

It happens like this:

Marinette Dupain-Cheng grows up in Paris, and so does Adrien Agreste. She’s black-haired (tinted blue in the sun), he’s blonde. She’s got blue eyes, he’s got green eyes. She has a loving family, he doesn’t. She’s middle class at best, he’s a millionaire’s child. He tolerates Chloe Bourgeois because they’ve known each other since childhood, and she’s friends with Nino and Kim and Rose and Juleka and Max and Nathanael and everyone in her class and—

They’re different in every way imaginable, is the point, and they both understand that clear as day.

*

Adrien’s mother disappears when he’s thirteen. He’s sad for a day or so and then gets over it. Agrestes don’t cry, his father tells him, stoic as always from the top of the stairs.

When Nathalie convinces him that Adrien will be less likely to notice his villain activities if he’s at school eight hours a day, he finally caves in.  
Adrien’s grateful, sure, but he’s also worried. Worried of what’s to come, worried of what’s wrong with his previously unbudging father, worried of the new achievements that possibly lay on the horizon.

He helps up an old man and finds a box with a ring in his room. Plagg comes with it, and suddenly he has a friend.

“I met him once,” Plagg reflects when Adrien asks him if he’s the genie in the lamp. “Big deal. I’m way more personable.”

Adrien has to agree.

*

“I bet Chloé’s in my class again,” Marinette tells her mother the first day of school.

“Four years in a row? Is that possible?” Sabine asks her. “Don’t worry, I’m sure everything will be fine.”

“Lucky me,” Marinette says, and walks downstairs. She drops the box of macarons rescuing an old man from a coming car and is late on the first day.

Lucky her.

*

Chloe, who, yes, is in her class again, mocks a new girl for her glasses, and her classmate Ivan turns into a rock monster.

A great start to the school year.

The school’s evacuated, of course, her new friend slash acquaintance Alya runs right into the almost completely destroyed building, and Marinette gives up and goes home. In her room there’s a box with a pair of earrings, and she at first flatly declines the Miraculous before being convinced by the bug-creature Tikki that she’s the “only one who can save Paris”. ########.

But she takes the earrings and transforms into Coccinelle, because she doesn’t know a word of English. With an black-and-red suit crafted of a too-tight spandex-like material (she makes a mental note to try to recreate it later at home), and a magical yo-yo—yes, yo-yo, of all things, she swings into the fight and forgets to capture the akuma.

*

Adrien goes to school the next day and sees Chloe putting chewing gum on a seat that most definitely isn’t her own. “Hey, hey, what’s that all about?” he asks her indignantly. They aren’t friends in this world, but tolerate each other just the same.

“None of your business,” she retorts, and he shoves her away, trying to pick off the gum.

That’s when Marinette walks in, chatting with Alya. Her eyes widen and fall into a glare. “Hey! What are you doing?”

“Um,” says Adrien.

“Very funny,” she tells him. “#######.”

“No, I was just—” He gestures to the gum. “Trying to take this off.”

“Yeah, right,” she says.

“No, really!”

A scoff, and she’s heading to her seat with Alya, tossing her hair behind her (there are no pigtails).

A boy wearing a cap has witnessed this whole exchange and whistles sympathetically. “Dude, once Marinette Dupain-Cheng sets her mind on an idea she doesn’t let go. Good luck getting her to like you now.”

“Helpful,” Adrien mutters.

He sighs. “I’m Nino. Friends?”

“Adrien,” he replies. “And...sure.”

*

In this world she’s more confident and her eyes flash with determination, so she defeats Stoneheart for the second time with the help of her new partner and doesn’t even think of giving up.

In this world things are darker, too, and Adrien’s superhero name is simply Noir. He doesn’t have a bell on his costume.

He falls in love with her just the same as always, because there isn’t a single timeline where one of them doesn’t love the other (though not necessarily romantically. That isn’t set in stone).

The only difference is, in this timeline she falls in love with him too.

“Paris is relying on our new guardian angels, Noir and Coccinelle, to save us all,” says Nadja Chamack over the news, after reporting the death toll of over a hundred. In this world the Ladybug Miraculous doesn’t undo death. “Our lives depend on them.”

In this world she means it.

*

The adored umbrella scene never happens. She sends him another icy glare and runs out into the rain, her hair sopping wet. He returns the glare at her back. Bunnix watches through her burrow and marvels at how different things could’ve been.

But this is Coccinelle’s world, not Ladybug’s. This is the world of a grey-eyed, grey-hearted Marinette Dupain-Cheng and an Adrien Agreste who let his grief turn into inescapable bitterness.

This is their _now_.

*

Six months later, someone’s akumatized during math class.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Marinette shouts. Adrien echoes her, and they both run out the door and cram under a table, not noticing the other, before stopping short and glaring.

“What are you doing here?” they ask simultaneously.

“Get out of here,” Marinette snaps. “And why were you following me?”

Adrien gives her a death glare. “I wasn’t. Just—leave.”

“You leave,” she shoots back. “I was here first.”

“I—I need to hide. Alone!”

“How entitled are you?”

“Excuse me, Princess, but you were the one who told me to get out!”

“And then you told me to leave!”

“Shut up!” he cries. “I need to hide!”

“You can hide with me just as well as you can hide alone!” She can hear the akuma wreaking havoc outside, and knows she needs to transform, but isn’t about to give up the fight to this #######.

“No, I can’t!”

“Yes, you can!”

“Can’t! I’m—I’m claustrophobic!”

“Marinette, the akuma!” a tiny voice whispers from her purse.

She ignores it and scoffs. “As if hiding alone would help that! And faking a phobia? That’s low, Agreste.”

“I’m not faking—You know what? I don’t have time for this. I’m going to go hide somewhere else.”

And he’s gone, leaving Marinette flabbergasted and slightly blushing—from anger, of course.

Nothing else.

Of course not.

*

After defeating the akuma, she’s sitting on a rooftop with Chat for a welcome talk, screw Chemistry and everything about it.

“...So there’s this girl, in my class, and she is the most annoying person alive,” Noir tells her, laughing.

She scoffs. “I bet she couldn’t hold a candle to this boy in my class. He’s so entitled it hurts.”

“You think he’s entitled?” Noir asks. “This girl thinks she’s the best thing since sliced bread. And so stubborn...”

“You want to talk about stubborn?” she asks indignantly, then laughs. “We’re arguing about who’s classmate is more annoying, look at us.”

“Pretty stupid, huh.” He leans back with his arms crossed under his head and sighs contentedly. “You’re the greatest, ‘elle.”

She blushes red and rubs the back of her neck, unwittingly mirroring a move that another, different boy is making in another dimension. “Thanks.”

*

They don’t reveal their identities until they’re seventeen years old, one week after the defeat of Hawkmoth, and at this point Adrien and Marinette hate each other more than ever. Coccinelle and Noir, on the other hand, have been dating for two and a half years.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

She takes a deep breath and releases her transformation in a flood of pink light. He does the same.

“Tikki, spots off.”

“Plagg, claws in.”

When Marinette opens her eyes, all she sees is Adrien’s icy glare. She automatically glares back before realizing the situation.

“We're breaking up,” he finally says, and she nods, numbly, subconsciously, watching him transform and leap away before going home and crying for hours.

*

They're twenty-nine years old, and see each other every now and then on the news or in class reunions and get-togethers. Adrien’s happily married to his fencing partner, Kagami, and Marinette to Juleka's older brother Luka. Marinette has three children, named Emma, Louis, and Hugo. Adrien is childless and perfectly happy with it.

From time to time they wonder what would have happened if things had gone...differently. If they hadn't hated each other from the start, if they hadn't broken up when they were seventeen, if…

But in the end it doesn't matter.

This is the world of Coccinelle and Noir, retired for twelve and a half years.

This is the world of Adrien and Marinette: rivals and enemies and a little bit more.

This is the world of Alya Cesaire, happily single in New York. Of Nino Lahiffe, DJ-ing in London. Of Kagami Tsurugi, world-famous fencing champion. Of Luka Couffaine. Of Max Kante.

This is their world.

This is their now.

*

Bunnix watches from her burrow and restarts the timeline. Maybe if she pores over this world enough, she’ll be able to figure out just what went wrong in hers.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm so sorry
> 
> tumblr @an-elysian-tree
> 
> leave kudos and comment if you liked it!!


End file.
